The majority opinion, written by Justice Byron White, argued that the Constitution did not confer "a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy."[1] A concurring opinion by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger cited the "ancient roots" of prohibitions against homosexual sex, quoting William Blackstone's description of homosexual sex as an "infamous crime against nature", worse than rape, and "a crime not fit to be named." Burger concluded: "To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching."[2] Justice Lewis F. Powell later said he regretted joining the majority, but thought the case of little importance at the time.

The dissent, authored by Justice Harry Blackmun, framed the issue as revolving around the right to privacy. Blackmun's dissent accused the Court of an "almost obsessive focus on homosexual activity" and an "overall refusal to consider the broad principles that have informed our treatment of privacy in specific cases." In response to invocations of religious taboos against homosexuality, Blackmun wrote: "That certain, but by no means all, religious groups condemn the behavior at issue gives the State no license to impose their judgments on the entire citizenry. The legitimacy of secular legislation depends, instead, on whether the State can advance some justification for its law beyond its conformity to religious doctrine."[3]

Seventeen years after Bowers v. Hardwick, the Supreme Court directly overruled its decision in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003), and held that anti-sodomy laws are unconstitutional.

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In August 1982, an Atlanta police officer issued Michael Hardwick a citation for public drinking after witnessing Hardwick throw a beer bottle into the brush along Monroe Ave after observing him violating the city's ordinance that prohibits drinking in public. When Hardwick did not appear in court, the court issued an arrest warrant for Hardwick. A few days later, officers went to Hardwick's apartment to serve the warrant.[4] Hardwick's roommate was sleeping on the couch in the living room. The roommate invited officers in and directed them down the hall to Hardwick's room. The door was open and the officers observed Hardwick and a companion engaged in mutual, consensual oral sex.[4]

Hardwick became hostile and threatened to have officers fired for entering his home.[citation needed] Both men were placed under arrest for sodomy, which was defined in Georgia law to include both oral sex and anal sex between members of the same or opposite sex.[5] The local district attorney elected not to present the charge to the grand jury, a prerequisite to any trial or punishment for the offense. Hardwick then sued Michael Bowers, the attorney general of Georgia, in federal court for a declaration that the state's sodomy law was invalid. He charged that as an active homosexual, he was liable to eventually be prosecuted for his activities.

The short concurring opinion by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger emphasized historical negative attitudes toward homosexual sex, quoting Sir William Blackstone's characterization of sodomy as "a crime not fit to be named."[2] Burger concluded, "To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching."

Opponents of sodomy laws criticized Bowers not only for its result but also because of the Court's dismissive treatment of the liberty and privacy interests of gay people. A sharply worded dissenting opinion by Justice Harry Blackmun attacked the majority opinion as having an "almost obsessive focus on homosexual activity." Justice Blackmun suggested that "[o]nly the most willful blindness could obscure the fact that sexual intimacy is 'a sensitive, key relationship of human existence, central to family life, community welfare, and the development of human personality'" (ironically quoting from the opinion by Chief Justice Burger in Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton, which held that obscene films are not constitutionally protected).

Blackmun revealed in a 1995 oral history with Harold Koh that his dissent in Bowers v. Hardwick was written primarily by openlygayPamela Karlan (then a law clerk for Blackmun and now professor of law at Stanford Law School). Blackmun said of the dissent, "Karlan did a lot of very effective writing, and I owe a lot to her and her ability in getting that dissent out. She felt very strongly about it, and I think is correct in her approach to it. I think the dissent is correct."[7]

Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. was considered the deciding vote during the case. He had initially voted to strike down the law but changed his mind after conservative clerk Michael W. Mosman advised him to uphold the ban.[8][9] In a concurring opinion, Powell voiced doubts about the compatibility of Georgia's law with the Eighth Amendment as it related to the prison sentence for conviction, but joined the majority opinion in upholding the law against a substantive due process attack. It has been argued that Powell's decision to uphold the law was influenced by the fact that he believed he had never known any homosexuals, unaware that one of his own law clerks was gay.[10][11] However, that clerk has said that Powell not only knew of his sexuality and had met his boyfriend, but that Powell had also asked to talk to him about the mechanisms of homosexual sex.[12]

In 1990, three years after retiring from the Court, Powell told a group of New York University law students that he considered his opinion in Bowers an error. "I do think it was inconsistent in a general way with Roe. When I had the opportunity to reread the opinions a few months later I thought the dissent had the better of the arguments."[13] However, Powell believed that the case was one of little importance and spent only thirty minutes thinking about it.[13]

According to Daniel Richman, former law clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall, Marshall's friendship with civil rights leader Bayard Rustin and Rustin's openness about his homosexuality played a significant role in Marshall's dissent. Richman also recalled that Marshall thought that the case was a "no-brainer," and told Richman, who wrote a bench memo for Marshall on the case, that "this [case] is controlled by Stanley."[14]

Bowers was decided at a time when the court's privacy jurisprudence, and in particular the right to abortion recognized in Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), had come under heavy criticism. Bowers signaled a reluctance by the Court to recognize a general constitutional right to privacy or to extend such a right further than they already had.[15]

The Georgia law upheld in Bowers criminalized oral sex and anal sex whether engaged in by people of the same sex or different sexes, but Justice White's decision was restricted to homosexual sex. "The only claim properly before the Court, therefore, is Hardwick's challenge to the Georgia statute as applied to consensual homosexual sodomy. We express no opinion on the constitutionality of the Georgia statute as applied to other acts of sodomy." State sodomy laws were seldom enforced against private, consensual conduct in the decades following the decision, though many courts and state governments interpreted it to justify a wide variety of bans and limitations on the lives of gay people.[16]

Bowers was used to deny suspect class qualification to gays and lesbians, thus restricting the standard of review to rational basis. Although Bowers was later overruled, decisions based on it, such as High Tech Gays v. Defense Industrial Security Clearance Office (1990), are sometimes still cited as precedent in gay rights cases.

In the years after Bowers was decided, several state legislatures repealed their sodomy laws. In addition, a number of state courts invalidated sodomy laws under privacy or other provisions of their state constitutions. The same sodomy law that was upheld in Bowers was struck down by the Georgia Supreme Court under the Georgia state constitution in the case of Powell v. State, 270 Ga. 327 (1998).[16] The remaining 13 state sodomy laws in the U.S. were invalidated, insofar as they applied to private consensual conduct among adults, by the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas 539 U.S. 558 (2003), which explicitly overturned Bowers. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in Lawrence, ruling that Texas's state sodomy law was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause (adult consensual sexual intimacy in one's home is a vital interest in liberty and privacy protected by the Due Process Clause). Kennedy wrote: "Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today. It ought not to remain binding precedent. Bowers v. Hardwick should be and now is overruled."

In 2009, a play based on the life of Michael Hardwick and the judicial proceedings, Sodomy Rules: The Bowers v. Hardwick Trial, was written and performed by Bill Crouch in New York City.[17]